Concerning the Rain

  Rain-stirred consciousness, an expanding ringlet moving out away from the shore into infinity from a single droplet of water. Waking to the realization that the gentle scratching was not the liquescence of his mind, but rainwater rolling down the window-pane. Glaring into red alpha-numerics burning his retina. Scarce after four PM.
  He sat up slowly, palm wiping a face waxy and plasticine, and moved to the window to gaze into a brick landscape blurred by waterspots and crowded grey skies.
  How many times had he woken this way? Seventeen years worth of nights, and mornings, and afternoons, each movement blurred into the next until the line where an end became another beginning vanished altogether, leaving just a series of one-act plays. How pathetic it all seemed from this vantage at the threshold of a hangover, where clarity was ironically often its most salient. How long would he remain here, just getting by in empty existence doping up in this bedroom in his parents’ house? Every passing motion an immolation to Hopelessness. Sooner or later it would come to a breaking point; he knew it was just a matter of time. He needed to get the hell out of here before that.
  But Ivy was right. He did need someone. He didn’t want to do it alone, a paradigm shift he recognized with as crystalline certainty as he saw the world through the rain-washed window. Admitting it frightened him, but he knew more surely than he could know anything that he didn’t want to be anywhere without her.